Category Archives: the ravages of time

The Snoop Dogg and Charlie Sheen collaboration that absolutely everyone no one has been clamoring for has finally surfaced. And it is every bit as terrible as you’d expect from a rapper who jumped the shark about eight years ago and an actor who nuked the fridge about eight weeks ago. It’s called…wait for it…”Winning.” Of course it is.

I miss young Death Row Snoop. The one who hung around with murderers and business-oriented thugs named Suge who held Vanilla Ice over balconies by his ankles. Come back to me, Doggfather!

The band thanked Drew for the first flash given at a Radiohead concert.

With the upcoming March 28 release of Radiohead’s tangible version of their newest record The King of Limbs, a preview of the sleeve and artwork has revealed a “thank you” from the band directed toward Drew Barrymore. Specifically,…

Some fan theories as to why the band has thanked Barrymore inclu….unnggghhh, I don’t care. What’s the exact opposite of “newsworthy”? Because that’s what this is. I’m gonna be honest with you, I just didn’t want to use today’s post to cover the story about Chris Brown hulking out on Good Morning America’s dressing room that’s already been all over the media today. Plus, it was a good excuse to post that banner photo and remind us all of the 20-year-old, attractive, care-free Drew Barrymore of yesteryear. And really, who’s to say that this is even the Drew Barrymore that Radiohead’s referring to? Why can’t it be, say, this Drew Barrymore…

He’s a single Chief Executive with a passion for kindness and a desire to meet someone who shares his thoughts on Santa Claus. Maybe Thom Yorke came across his MySpace page one day and felt inspired. And…holy crap, he’s from the UK! He could have run into him on the street! Is anyone still reading this? Because you’re witnessing peerless investigative journalism, first-hand. I hope you’re taking notes.

To no one’s surprise, Kurt Cobain has finally made his way into a guitar/band simulation game. Activision’s Guitar Hero 5 to be exact. To everyone’s even less surprise, Courtney Love has opened her ghoulish, no-longer-relevant mouth. Complained through her oftentimes completely unreadable, run-on tweeting to be exact. And let’s be honest, her upcoming suit against Activision will likely be dismissed after she wakes up from some months-long, drug-induced haze to find her copy of the contract she personally signed and kissed with two sticks worth of smeared fire engine red lip liner.

The remaining two members of Nirvana had this to say about his inclusion in the game…

While we were aware of Kurt’s image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn’t know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants. We urge Activision to do the right thing in “re-locking” Kurt’s character so that this won’t continue in the future… It’s hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists’ music alongside cartoon characters. Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world. We feel he deserves better.

Now, I like Dave Grohl. Alright, I love Dave Grohl. A great frontman, songwriter, drummer, good guitarist, and a dude with a great sense of humor who seems genuinely likable. But enough with the retarded joint statements with Krist Novoselic. They’ve made quite a habit of them, and this one is too infuriating to ignore. (Though, it’s easy to see why they all just ooze politician…)

Get a fucking grip. Of course Cobain wouldn’t be into that shit if he were still alive, but the guy’s been dead for 15 years. It’s not tarnishing any image or perception of him and his music. It’s an animated image of him as an homage to his influence on rock. It’s not like they’re dragging his rotted corpse onto a real stage and having him sing and dance his way through “Love Shack”, marionette-style. Yeah, we know he “wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world”. So did every other artist in the game. Do they all “deserve better”, too? And what exactly would be “better” for him? Having him front only serious punk songs and downer grunge tracks, then blow his head off after the game’s final performance? OMFG, it’s so realistic!!1!!one!

Where were Foo Fighters and Nickelback? Or even a band like Three Days Grace, who had a pretty big year? There was no Vampire Weekend or Daughtry. It was very one-sided. … [The award show is] raising the bar of confusion and disarray. The VMAs are consistently clusterfucks, and this year set a new standard. … You had people who were invited sitting out in the streets. Plus, everybody was texting, no one was watching the show. I got super bummed out. … I think the VMAs have completely lost touch with a broad scope of music. It was very bubble gum and Disney, which is why bands like Foo Fighters, and everybody else in my group weren’t there.

I can’t say that I even remotely enjoy Linkin Park or half the bands he mentioned in his rant, but the dude makes some brilliant statements about MTV’s flagship award show and, by proxy, the state of the network in general. He is saying nothing that most of us didn’t already know or think, but it’s nice to see it come from an actual product of MTV’s influence over popular music and culture.

The VMAs, much like their host network, is neither cool, outrageous, spontaneous, edgy, funny, or entertaining anymore. In fact, it manages to be the exact opposite of all of these at once. The 15 minutes of this year’s show that I could bear to watch bombarded me with an unfunny, awkward Brit spewing predictable political rants before introducing mush-brain music acts to a bored celebrity audience. Keep in mind that approximately 78% of this celebrity audience was either drunk, lit up, or awesomely both, and still had enough sense to be bored by this abortion and its attempt to convince us all that Britney Spears, coming off the lowest, most bat-shit, white trash year of her career and life, deserved a handful of their dopey Moonman awards.

A couple weeks ago saw the one year anniversary of Scratchin’ Letters. After settling into a comfortable pace of about two posts per month, I know what you’re thinking, and sometimes even I can’t believe I’ve honed such a mature, gripping writing style in only one year of topical, eye-opening posts.

This is distressing for a number of reasons. This is the band itself coming out against the usage…not their management. Read the article for a retarded comment by Kiedis. And though they may have it copyrighted, they certainly didn’t come up with the term. It was created by some corny Oregon resident trying to keep Californians out of his state via a bumper-sticker. Really hard to believe, I know.

Also, the perfectly-titled show kicks ass, and, in many ways, acts very much as a tribute to rock n’ roll and the Chili Peppers in particular. Series title aside, the show is basically a running ad for the band with a character named Dani California and even an episode containing a narration sequence which quotes the album’s title track: “It’s the edge of the world and all of western civilization”.

I imagine that if I was at all a fan of Van Halen, I would be a little pissed at the news that Wolfgang Van Halen, the doughy, most likely spoiled, prepubescent son of Eddie will be replacing Michael Anthony on bass for the world-tour reunion of that mess of a band and a possible new album. Rather, I’m drooling over the idea of three Van Halens versus one Lee Roth in a fight to the greasy-haired, awful-pun-making rocker death on the world’s stage.